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A Sunoco spin off, Sunoco Logistics Partners, plans to build a pipeline to transport propane and ethane from the Marcellus Shale to a former Sunoco refinery in Marcus Hook, PA., where it will build facilities to process, store, chill and distribute the gases.

Philadelphia’s energy sector may be moving closer to the cutting edge than it has been in some time.

The reasons include new owners for its oil refineries; its proximity to the Marcellus Shale; its legacy in power-grid management; and a federal effort to support energy-efficient building technology.

“Philadelphia could be on the forefront of upgrading the old infrastructure and turning it into a valuable platform for the energy industry and the energy world going forward,” said Stephen P. Mullin, a senior vice president and principal with Econsult Corp., a Philadelphia-based economic consulting firm.

The Philadelphia region stands to benefit from the widespread adoption of new drilling technologies that make it economically feasible to recover oil and gas once thought to be permanently locked in the earth. That has produced a drilling boom in such formations as the Marcellus Shale, which underlies much of the Appalachian Mountains, and the Bakken, which is beneath parts of North Dakota, Montana and Saskatchewan.

The abundance of gas and oil from both has contributed to changes at the area’s refineries; opportunities for the area’s few exploration-and-production and pipeline-and-processing companies; and the launch of two businesses that provide material used in the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

Little of this would have seemed likely just three years ago when Sunoco Inc., once a major industrial conglomerate, closed its 150,000-barrels-a-day Eagle Point refinery in West Deptford, N.J.

The Philadelphia company would eventually decide to get out of the refining business entirely, retaining ownership of a chain of gas stations and about a third of the equity interest in Sunoco Logistics Partners LP, an operator of oil and oil-product pipelines and terminals that Sunoco spun off in 2002.

When Sunoco closed Eagle Point, which is now a tank farm and terminal for Sunoco Logistics, it owned three of the six refineries in the Philadelphia area. San Antonio, Texas-based Valero Corp. owned two and Houston-based ConocoPhillips owned one.

Today, Sunoco is the only one of those companies with a stake in a Philadelphia-area refinery. It owns a third of Philadelphia Energy Solutions, a joint venture formed in September between it and The Carlyle Group, a Washington, D.C.-based asset-management firm, to take over Sunoco’s 330,000-barrels-per-day refinery in Philadelphia.

Sunoco closed its 175,000-barrels-per-day refinery in Marcus Hook, PA, in December 2011. In September, Sunoco Logistics said it would build a pipeline to transport propane and ethane from the Marcellus Shale to the refinery site, where it would build facilities to process, store, chill and distribute the gases.

Sunoco itself was bought for $4.9 billion last month in a deal that gave its interest in Sunoco Logistics to Houston-based Energy Transfer Partners LP and split the rest of it between ETP and Energy Equity Partners LP, which owns ETP’s general partner.

PBF Energy, of Parsippany, N.J., bought Valero’s 190,000-barrels-a-day Delaware City, Del., refinery for $220 million in June 2010 and Valero’s 180,000-barrels-a-day Paulsboro, N.J., refinery for $340 million six months later.

The Monroe Energy LLC subsidiary of Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines Inc. bought ConocoPhillips’ 185,000-barrels-per-day refinery in Trainer, Pa. for $180 milllion to provide Delta with jet fuel in a deal that closed last June.

Philadelphia Energy Solutions, PBF and Monroe have said they are going to bring in crude oil from the Bakken for their refineries because it’s cheaper than the oil that the refineries have traditionally used, which comes from Africa and the North Sea.

Philadelphia Energy Solutions also plans to bring in gas from Marcellus Shale for various uses at its refinery site, including in a plant it plans to build to make urea ammonium nitrate fertilizer.

The Marcellus Shale also is fueling the growth of four publicly traded partnerships with area roots.

A fourth, Radnor, PA-based PVR Partners LP, closed on a $1.06 billion acquisition in May that will make it predominantly a midstream natural gas business with substantial operations in the Marcellus Shale.

In addition, two area companies hope to capitalize on the type of drilling done in the Marcellus Shale.

Radnor, Pa.-based Preferred Sands LLC has become one of the largest U.S. producers of the sand used in fracking with six sand mines. Fairless Hills, PA-based Smart Sand Inc. has a sand mine in Wisconsin.

The region also has a chance to become a leader in smart-grid technology, thanks to Valley Forge, Pa.-based PJM Interconnection, which operates both a power grid that spans 13 states and the largest power market in the world.

PJM’s former chief operating officer, Audrey Zibelman, cofounded Philadelphia-based Viridity Energy Inc., a developer of power management and storage technology that in August received a $15 million investment from Tokyo-based Mitsui & Co. Ltd. as part of Mitsui’s plan to build out its Smart Green Information Technology business.

The region also hopes to, with help from the federal government, become a leader in technology to make buildings more energy efficient.

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